As you route another job to your digital press today, take a moment to reflect on the fact that xerographic technology has come a long way since it was invented 75 years ago this month.

It was October 22, 1938, in Astoria, N.Y., when Chester Carlson, a patent attorney and part-time inventor, made the first successful xerographic copy. In the six and a half decades since that historic day, xerography has grown to become an integral part of our daily lives—an outcome that would have seemed preposterous to Carlson's contemporaries. In fact, due to the extreme apathy of the companies to which Carlson tried to market his idea, the first convenient xerographic office copier was not introduced until 1959—21 years after the process was invented.

Genesis Of An Idea

Carlson, an only child, was born in Seattle in 1906. As a teenager, he worked for a printer and eventually acquired a press of his own, which he used to publish a small magazine for amateur chemists. It was a short-lived experiment, but it had a lasting effect.

"This experience did impress me with the difficulty of getting words into hard copy, and this, in turn, started me thinking about duplicating processes," Carlson recalled, years later.

After attaining a degree in physics, Carlson took a job at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York. He was laid off during the Depression, but eventually got a job with P.R. Mallory & Co., an electronics firm. He earned a law degree from New York Law School, and was later promoted to manager of Mallory's patent department.

There, in this heavy paperwork environment, Carlson noticed the consistent shortage of carbon copies of patent specifications. He began to conceive of a device that would accept a document and make copies of it in seconds.

Bob has served as editor of In-plant Graphics since October of 1994. Prior to that he served for three years as managing editor of Printing Impressions, a commercial printing publication. Mr. Neubauer is very active in the U.S. in-plant industry. He attends all the major in-plant conferences and has visited more than 130 in-plant operations around the world. He has given presentations to numerous in-plant groups in the U.S., Canada and Australia, including the Association of College and University Printers and the In-plant Printing and Mailing Association. He also coordinates the annual In-Print contest, cosponsored by IPMA and In-plant Graphics.